The present invention relates to airborne scanning radar systems.
Aperturres in aircraft fuselages (such as the rear loading doors of cargo aircraft) are typically longer in the fore-and-aft sense than they are wide. A body such as a radar pod which can be extended from such an aperture and/or retracted into it may similarly be longer than it is wide.
It is sometimes desirable in radar engineering to provide a radar aerial with the maximum attainable horizontal dimension (known as aperture). It is then sometimes desirable to rotate such an aerial in azimuth when in operation.
Whereas it is hence possible to deploy from the fuselage of an aircraft in flight a radar aerial with an aperture which is larger than the fuselage is wide, by the expedient of aligning it fore-and-aft during this process, it is undesirable to then rotate it through large angles if doing this would create an aerodynamically asymmetric body with reference to the aircraft's direction of flight and so generate unusual aerodynamic forces.